Super Bowl ad to rile abortion politics

Anti-abortion crusader and would-be Democratic candidate for president Randall Terry expects the FCC to decide as soon as Friday if TV stations must run his graphic ads — featuring aborted fetuses — during Sunday’s Super Bowl.

“I think we’re going to win,” Terry told POLITICO on Thursday.

Story Continued Below

Terry, founder of the anti-abortion group Operation Rescue in the 1980s, has been fighting to get NBC’s WMAQ station in Chicago to air the commercial during the game under rules that require broadcasters to give access to legitimate candidates. The TV station turned Terry down, after the Democratic Party disavowed him, but now Terry is asking federal regulators to intervene.

Terry said that a half-dozen other stations across the country will run the ads as they are already “bought and paid for.”

While the ads contain what many would consider objectionable images, Terry contends that TV stations are legally barred from denying a “bona fide” federal candidate reasonable access to the airwaves. A similar issue came up in Florida when GOP presidential candidate Mitt Romney used portions of an NBC News broadcast to skewer rival Newt Gingrich before last week’s primary.

“Broadcasters do not have the right to control how a candidate speaks to the voters,” said Andrew Jay Schwartzman, vice president and policy director for the Media Access Project, a nonprofit public interest group.

In 1996, Schwartzman was one of the attorneys who won Becker v. FCC, a federal court case that helped establish a candidate’s ability to control his own message.

“The issue here is whether Terry is a legal bona fide candidate,” Schwartzman said. “There are good reasons to believe he is not, but it is a complicated question.”

WMAQ said in a filing with the FCC that it rejected the ads after finding Terry was not a legitimate candidate, citing a letter from the Democratic Party discrediting his standing.

In a statement, WMAQ said, “After a thorough review, we've determined that Mr. Terry does not meet the FCC requirements to become a ‘bona fide’ candidate for the Democratic nomination for president of the United States and, therefore, will not be permitted to advertise on our station.”

FCC officials declined to comment.

Terry contends that his candidacy is legit, although he is a write-in contestant in Illinois. When asked if he was a Republican or a Democrat, he answered: “I’m a registered Democrat right now, and that’s what matters.”

Terry said that he’s presenting a legitimate point of view even though he has little hope at winning the nomination. His campaign is more about defeating President Barack Obama, he added.

“My intention is to cause Obama’s defeat in the 2012 election,” Terry said, calling Obama a “tyrant who is at war with the Catholic Church and is the promoter of mass murder.”

The Democratic Party is attempting to discredit Terry’s candidacy.

"Mr. Terry's claims to be a Democratic candidate for president are false," Patrick Gaspard, the Democratic National Committee executive director, wrote in a letter posted on Terry’s website. "Accordingly, he should not be accorded the benefits of someone conducting a legitimate campaign for public office."